


The Dark Side of Unrequited

by twinyards



Category: Like Us Series - Krista Ritchie & Becca Ritchie
Genre: Angst, F/M, Heavy Angst, i hate myself for writing this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-15
Updated: 2018-03-15
Packaged: 2019-03-31 16:19:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13978899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twinyards/pseuds/twinyards
Summary: “Do you want me off your detail?”My responding flinch to his words is so violent that I actually stumble back a few steps. I wonder if he can even hear my whisper, riddled with the shredding of my heart beneath the blades of agony sweeping over this moment, when I say, “How can you even ask me that?”





	The Dark Side of Unrequited

I don’t know how we got here. Only I do, and I don’t want to admit it. This conversation is so fucking ass backwards that it makes me cringe.  _ “Sulli, we need to talk about this.” _ That sentence alone should have been a tell, but the distance between Akara and I these past weeks has been so heavy on my body that I feel it like a physical weight on my limbs. 

We weren’t ever supposed to have this conversation. But it’s starting. And now I’m staring at Akara’s face and I want Beckett or Moffy or Jane here to hold my hand and tell me I can do this because I’m not sure I have the strength.

“Will you please talk to me?” He begs, and takes a step toward me. We’re only a few feet apart, but his attempt to close the distance is enough to take my breath away. I won’t be able to think if he comes any closer. When I take a step back, Akara pales like I’ve just mortally wounded him. “Sulli,  _ please _ .”

I’m shaking my head before I can think to stop myself. “We don’t have anything to talk about.” The denial comes so naturally, I wonder how long I’ve been doing it. Since Moffy told me he thought I had feelings for Akara? Before? 

How long have I wanted him? I can’t decipher the moment where our friendship turned into something more. When the feeling of his fingers in my hair stopped being playful and started setting my skin on fire. When I looked for him in a room not out of habit but because my body pulled toward his like we were magnetized. 

“Yes, we do.” Akara urges. He makes a gutteral noise of distress that pulls at something deep in my stomach.  _ Kits _ . I hate that he’s suffering. I hate that I’m the cause. “You’ve barely spoken to me in weeks. Things have been weird with us since that day on the stairs in Greece -”

“Do you want me to tell you you’re forgiven? Fine. You’re forgiven. Now can we please drop this?”

“No!” He snaps, and I can see the fracture behind his eyes as if it’s in slow motion. As if he’s glass and I’ve just taken a hammer to his most fragile edge. “No, because this is  _ killing _ me. We have to fix it. Please, just let me fix it.”

I want to. More than anything I wish there was a magic phrase that would make this an easy situation. But there’s a reason I never wanted to talk about this with him. Because no matter how this conversation ends, we both lose. 

“We can’t talk about this.” I tell him, hating every word. “I can’t let you. Kits, you  _ love your job _ .”

Silence stretches for a long moment. I can tell by his stance that he wants to reach for me. When you spend so much of your life with another person, you learn their every tell. The strain of his shoulders; he’s forcing his arms to remain at his sides. The twitch of his fingers; he wants to grab my shoulders, to comfort me. The hard tension in his jaw; he’s holding in as much of his emotion as he can to keep me from panicking.

Only I’m already panicking. The moment he said we needed to talk, the moment I realized where this was going, my chest seized and my breathing left my control. I’ve always been cautious, always towing the line of fear before taking quick steps back from the edge. But I’ve never been so thoroughly destroyed by terror before. 

“And what if I love you more?” 

This is when I stop breathing. When I’m certain the world is punishing me. I’ve longed to hear those words with an intensity I’m just beginning to admit to myself, and at the same time I wish he’d never uttered them. Because I know what SFO means to Akara, and I refuse to be the thing that takes that away from him. If we go down this road, there’s no guarantee it’ll be accepted the way Moffy and Farrow were. SFO is already pushing too many boundaries, and Akara can’t be the one to break them. 

There’s ice in my lungs and glass in my throat as I try to speak. Every infinitesimal speck of air in my chest is a sharp knife of agony. I don’t want this.  _ “I love you,”  _ wasn’t a phrase that was ever supposed to hurt. 

Neither of us has dared to move. Not since he took a step forward and I took a step back. There’s some guilt in me, realizing that Akara thinks I’m  _ afraid _ of him. I can see it in the tight set of his mouth, the upward curve of his eyebrows, and the glaze over his eyes that matches mine. 

We’re both holding still, but we aren’t. Pur feet haven’t shifted, but Akara keeps leaning forward, like he wants to reach for me, and then thinks better of it. And I’m shaking so hard I can barely see his face. This wasn’t how this conversation was supposed to go. Fuck, I didn’t even want to have this conversation at all. I’d planned to avoid it forever, to deny and doubt and evade until it slipped away and were just Kits and Sulli again, friends who banter and laugh together. 

But I know that’s not possible anymore. Things are irrevocably changed now. And it terrifies me. 

The silence in the room is so heavy I feel as if I can hear our spirits shredding; paper hearts being crushed into crinkled, disfigured, unrecognizable things in our chests under each other’s hands. We’re destroying something I thought indestructible. 

“Sul…” Akara starts, but he chokes off his words.

There’s so much emotion in his voice that I nearly take a step forward. But I’m paralyzed by my fear. I wish I was more like my mom in this moment - bold and flirtatious and never hesitating to speak from her heart. But I’m not her. My life has been swimming and my family. I never took the time to think about falling in love until it happened completely on accident. And now I have no idea what to do, because love isn’t simple. It’s messy and cracked and I’m afraid of cutting myself on it’s rough edges. 

“Do you want me off your detail?”

My responding flinch to his words is so violent that I actually stumble back a few steps. I wonder if he can even hear my whisper, riddled with the shredding of my heart beneath the blades of agony sweeping over this moment, when I say, “How can you even ask me that?”

He eyes me warily. “You didn’t say it back.”

I close my eyes. I can’t keep looking at him; at the pain that’s so clearly written across his features that I can feel it as if it were my own. I know my parents love was never easy. Or my aunts or uncles. They all fought so hard to belong to each other, to ignore the world and dive into their own hearts before paparazzi and meddlers could taint that purity of their affections.

I know that Lily and Lo nearly killed each other with their love. I know that Connor and Rose used every once of their willpower to overcome their own fears and admit they belonged together. I know that my parents were in love for years before either dared to touch the other. I know they all suffered to be with the loves of their lives. 

But I am not my aunts and uncles. I’m not my parents. And I can’t bear the thought of being the one that takes away from Akara everything he’s worked for. Studio 9 and Omega are everything to him. I can’t picture him without them. They are so much more a part of him than I will ever be. 

I can’t be selfish with him. Not with this.

Eyes still closed, I finally whisper. “I can’t.”

Akara makes a choked noise. Something so terrible I’d only expect to hear it if someone were dying. My eyes snap open, and I can see there are tear stains on his cheeks. He’s still facing me, but he won’t meet my gaze. Somehow that’s the worst part of all of this. That I can see every fracture racing across his heart, and he refuses to see mine. And then I remind myself that I’m the one saying no.

_ Because  _ I love him, I won’t let him destroy everything he’s built. Because I love him, I won’t take away the family he’s built in SFO. Because I love him, I’m going to let him go before he ever really becomes mine. 

After an eternity, Akara finally nods. He keeps his gaze on the ground as he says, “I’ll see about transferring someone else to your detail tomorrow.”

“What?” I start, “Kits, no-”

“ _ Don’t _ ,” he whispers, and it hear it like it’s a plea to the gods. His eyes are bloodshot, red rimmed as he finally meets my gaze. “Please don’t, okay? I can’t - I can’t look at you every day and pretend this,” he gesture between the two of us, “never happened. I just can’t.”

Nothing's going right. My head is spinning. My heart is a broken winged bird in my chest, trying desperately to fly before crash landing again. This is not what I wanted. Denying him was supposed to save our friendship. It was supposed to make everything go back to the way it was before, or as close as we could. 

“This is your job-” I start, and it’s the wrong thing to say.

Akara gives a rueful look, tinged with hurt. “I’m off duty.”

“That’s not what I meant -” 

“Then what did you mean?” He bites back, and there’s a sob in his throat but he swallows it back. Akara speaks for me, because he always knows what I’m thinking before I do. “That you didn’t want me to lose my position with the Tri-Force? That you’re protecting me somehow? I wouldn’t have said anything if I hadn’t made up my mind for myself, Sulli. 

“You were worth the risk to me.” He spits out the next words like they are venom, stinging his mouth. “I’m just not the worth the risk for you.”

He doesn’t wait for me to reply. He just shakes his head and towards toward the door. “I’ll have someone from Alpha here tomorrow,” is all he says, before he walks away. 

I don’t chase after him, even though I want to. I’m caught on his words, replaying them over and over in my mind.  _ You were worth the risk to me _ . But it’s not the sentence itself. It’s the  _ were _ . Past tense. Like he’s already changed his mind. Like our ten minute conversation changes everything he felt about me. 

This is the dark side of unrequited. We’re both drowning in rejection, when I know we both ache to push ourselves together until we can’t distinguish where one starts and the other ends. Even as I sink to the ground in my entryway, head in my hands, I tell myself I’ve done that right thing. That Akara will thank me someday for not letting him throw his career away. 

I hope I’m not lying to myself. I hope I am. 

I can’t tell what’s worse; watching the person you love learn to be happy without you, or knowing you might be the thing that broke them.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I hope y'all enjoyed this! I'm now @lunellys on tumblr, and you can request more Like Us works there!  
> As always, comments, kudos, and feedback are always appreciate :-)   
> Thanks so much for reading!


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